We're going to follow the money now with our regular Friday political commentators, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Welcome back to you both.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to be here.
E.J. DIONNE: Good to be with you.
BLOCK: And I want to start with a hypothetical question. What would this primary contest, do you think, have looked like without superPACs and without the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision? David Brooks, a very different race?
The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will make available same-day audio of upcoming oral arguments later this month, arguments that could determine the fate of the Obama health care overhaul.
Originally published on Fri March 16, 2012 3:16 pm
A highly popular episode of This American Life in which monologuist Mike Daisey tells of the abuses at factories that make Apple products in China contained "significant fabrications," the show said today.
Union members rally outside of Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn's office on Feb. 2, demanding pay raises he withheld. Quinn said the state doesn't have the money to cover the raises.
Illinois is in the worst fiscal shape of any state in the country.
Its pension system is $85 billion short of what it will need to pay promised retirement benefits, while it's already $8 billion behind on its everyday bills — money for schools, hospitals and private vendors for work already done and approved.
All of that could be good news next week — at least politically — says Illinois state Treasurer Dan Rutherford.
Originally published on Fri March 16, 2012 1:14 pm
The "family friend" who told The Oregonian that its editorial page editor was in his car on Saturday when he died of a heart attack turns out to have been another editor at the newspaper. She says she was trying to protect Caldwell's family from the public embarrassment that would come with the truth: that he had been in the apartment of a young woman with whom he was allegedly having sex.
A Wisconsin GOP lawmaker facing a recall election called it quits Friday and said she hopes the state can get past scenes like this gathering of protesters in Madison on March 10, 2012.
Originally published on Wed December 19, 2012 9:45 am
When an Ohio high school student killed three classmates in a shooting rampage several weeks ago, it once again brought a national spotlight to a problem widely believed to be epidemic in schools.
The reality, experts say, is exactly the opposite: Violent crime in schools has decreased significantly since the early 1990s.
Why are some nations rich and others poor? In a new book called Why Nations Fail, a pair of economists argue that a lot comes down to politics.
To research the book, the authors scoured the world for populations and geographic areas that are identical in all respects save one: they're on different sides of a border.
It's just an update, but people made lines in cities around the world to buy Apple's latest incarnation of the iPad.
Look at this line outside an Apple store in London:
And this scene at a Manhattan Apple store:
NPR's David Folkenflik was in New York City and he filed this report for our Newscast unit:
"In Manhattan, lines wrapped full city blocks at Apple Stores last night as fans waited to buy the new device in person — and that's just for an upgrade on the iPad.
